Sorry cancel culture you can’t claim Puccini’s Turandot

The New York Times’ (NYT) music critic, Anthony Tommasini, has lost his marbles. He has called for the Franco Zeffirelli production of Puccini’s Turandot, which has graced the Met stage in New York since 1987 to sell out crowds, to be scrapped. 

The good news is no one is paying him a blind bit of notice. From 1987 – 2019 the Zeffirelli, set in a sumptuous facsimile of ancient Peking, was apparently ok. But since then, “A wave of anti-Asia hostility has compelled the arts to re-examine lingering prejudices and racist stereotypes”. Really? Missed that gig.

What is he on about? Trump’s trade war? That started in 2016. If we are to ban historical cultural references in art because politicians have cyclical hissy fits stages will fall dark across the planet. 

Does Tommasini mean immigration? 

The last time I looked, US campuses were awash with bright Asian visa holding students knocking intellectual spots off their lardy American fellow alumni. Some 320,000 of them, or 75 per cent of international students in the US in 2020. 

“Not just Zeffirelli’s extravagant production, but the opera itself, set in the fantastical Peking of legend – is an example of the problem.” 

So, goodbye to fantasy in opera.

Farewell to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, the phantom ship doomed to roam the oceans forever due to slipshod build quality – disrespectful of shipwrights, maybe even the Dutch. Don’t even go close to Prospero’s relationship with Caliban in Thomas Adès’ The Tempest.

That will be the same problem that inspired Chinese director Zhang Yimou to stage a spectacular version of Turandot that out-Zeffirelli’d the Met production, in the heart of the Forbidden City in 2003 to huge acclaim in the People’s Republic.

What Tommasini is on about is sucking up to the fashionable, now rampant statue-tear-down brigade, feeding like locusts on past historical references they nominate for Room 101.

 They self-declare an increasingly extensive opus of long-accepted cultural works – books, art, opera cartoons – as “unacceptable” for today’s sensitive audiences. 

Then they move onto street names derived from historical events. Bad news if you happen to live on Mafeking Street. Move. All is justified by their newly-invented meme – white supremacy. 

The NYT critic did not get away scot-free. Incidentally, Tommasini, that’s not a racist cultural reference. A “scot” was an Icelandic tax. Of course, Scots, myself included, like taxes – mainly if they are being levied on the English. Step up Heather MacDonald (not a Scot, but there is a whiff of Caledonia somewhere) of the Manhattan Institute. 

She is a welcome scourge of the woke. Her latest publication, “If BLM Cared About Lives, They Would Support Anti-Crime Units“, gives readers a sense that this doughty scholar is not afraid to buck fashionable thought trends. She is a sort of American female reincarnation of Christopher Hitchens. 

She defends Turandot so: “It is faithful to Puccini’s intentions. No sane person would think that Asians are threatened by its portrayal of the ministers or any other characters. 

Yet today’s political narcissism drags every artistic expression into a single narrative of oppression and discredits those that fail current standards of enlightenment. In this way is the human imagination constrained and crushed. See the Zeffirelli Turandot now; this is your last chance.”

She could have gone further, as the plot is not Puccini’s, nor that of his librettists, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. After an extensive search for a plot, it was adapted from a Schiller version of a 1762 play by Count Carlo Gozzi. Turandot’s cultural roots dive deep.

Puccini’s operas were geographically far-flung, and it is interesting to reflect that only two are set in his native Italy. The composer aimed to bring cultural insights unfamiliar to his audiences, deepening experience with all the force the operatic medium can muster.

Hence the attraction of the mythic tale of the ancient Chinese court. Turandot does not mock China. Rather it is an accessible gateway to a culture totally unfamiliar to 19th and early 20th century audiences.

The good news is that no one at the Met has risen to the Tommasini bait. Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager, who opened the season with the sensitively chosen Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Terence Blanchard, the first opera by an African American composer to be staged at the Lincoln Center, has not reacted. He has not even been as positive as Delphic.

I reacted when I attended a performance last week. I was bowled over by the spectacle, even though Turandot is not an opera I much like. My problem with the work is that the principal characters are detestable, and the plot is morally corrupt. 

Prince Calaf behaves towards Turandot like a besotted internet troll, callously ignoring the family servant Liù who has been selflessly guiding his blind father, the deposed king of Tartary, Tamur. Calaf’s on a Booking.com tour of Asia that has gone badly wrong.

Yusif Eyvazov, the tenor from Baku, who also nailed the role of Rodolfo in the Met’s La Bohème last week, reprised the role of the bounder prince and was magnificent. His is a dramatic, ringing tenor voice. He strode the high hurdle of Nessun Dorma effortlessly, bringing the house down. He was excellent in his first Met appearance as Calaf in 2015. More mature delivery six years on.

Emperor Altoum, ably sung by American tenor Scott Scully, who makes four Met appearances this season, may be supreme and encouraged by his subjects to “live for 10,000 years”, but he can’t reign in his bonkers daughter. 

He is supremely frustrated and miserable. I commend him as a good choice to star in the launch episode of I’m an Emperor, Get Me Out of Here, should any desperate Netflix content creators be reading this column.

I am pleased to report that Christine Goerke, one of the best exponents of the Turandot role today, is totally out of character. It must take a huge effort to assume Turandot’s denouncing scowls. 

During Covid lockdown, while the Met stage was dark, she gamely appeared on a scratch Zoom based programme, Cadenza, I scrambled together for the Metropolitan Opera Club. Complete charmer.

There she was in her Long Island home, baking apple pies, letting us into not just her career, but her life – and not the severed head of a riddle-bamboozled aspirant lover in sight. 

She was reprising her triumphant 2015 season appearance. Fresh from singing Sieglinde at the Bayreuther Festspiel, Goerke was clearly in the mood to give Turandot her all. Sopranos often miss out on the husky low notes that give mezzos so much character, and Goerke’s superb range covered that nicely. Turandot was on the rampage.

The only sympatico character, loyal little Liù, driven to suicide to save her indifferent prince, was soprano Michelle Bradley. She captured the spirit of Puccini’s mostly tragic heroines perfectly. Self-deprecatingly she claims she is a country bumkin. She is anything but. 

This rising Kentucky star won over many Manhattan hearts. She performed the role of Woman of Crete in Mozart’s Idomeneo in 2017. She will be back. 

Readers familiar with the plot can safely skip the next few paragraphs. 

A Chinese princess has decided to lop off the head of any itinerant suitor who fails to answer any of three riddles. Turandot’s murderous inclinations stem from her desire to avenge a violated ancestor: She is Medusa without the snake comb-over. Many come, many receive the chop.

They keep coming, because, self-evidently, none of them are able to comment on their experience on Trip Advisor to warn the others:” Peking: Three stars. Empress wonderful. Riddles impossible. Shame about the severed head thing.”

Enter an exiled prince from a fallen kingdom, Calaf, incognito. He is reunited with his blind father and the girl servant Liù, who has been in love with him since childhood. A love callously ignored.

Love at first sight for the exotic princess – they had perhaps connected on Tinder – inspires the headstrong man to enter Turandot’s contest – which, to everyone’s surprise, he wins. 

The petulant princess is furious, gets cold feet, so Calaf gives her an out. “Discover my name by morning,” he says, “and you can use my head as a pike ornament.” 

Lots of discussions ensue. Cue Nessun Dorma (No one sleeps), and the 1990 World Cup is finally underway ……. Sorry. Getting carried away with Pavarotti smash hit memories. 

Back to Peking. A citywide search and a little torture follow as Turandot’s enforcers try to pry Calaf’s name from little Liù. She kills herself rather than reveal Calaf’s identity. 

Finally, morning dawns, the icy princess melts and she declares that Calaf’s name must be “Love”. One cannot resist the feeling that their subsequent homelife in The Forbidden City will be problematic, haunted by the ghost of Liù.

Puccini died before he could complete Turandot. The final scene was written by fellow composer, Franco Alfano. The conductor, Arturo Toscanini, perhaps fiddled with the score. 

No doubt about it. The transition from the poignant death of Liù, the note upon which Puccini usually drew the curtain on his tubercular heroines, is clunky. Maestro Joseph Colaneri, Glimmerglass music director and Met conductor, is convinced Puccini found ending Turandot simply beyond him. 

Caveats aside, it is a masterpiece and does not need Tommasini to bang on about the Gilbert and Sullivan like officials, Ping, Pang and Pong being disrespectful to Chinese culture. They are comedic, an alliterative joke at the expense of bureaucrats everywhere. Lighten up. 

And while Tommasini is on his high horse, is he going to strip the repertoire of Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen – cruelty to bulls – Elektra – cruelty to pretty much everyone – Salome, Don Giovanni ……?

The list is endless because punchy, throat-grabbing opera reflects imperfect life, and that is its dramatic strength and often moral purpose. 

Basically, Tommasini and his ilk would strip the medium of the discomfort zone, which sends audiences home not just whistling tunes but reflecting on the experiences of complex characters who have courageously shared their life experiences with us.

Given any platform, mezzo Joyce DiDonato bangs on rightly about opera “connecting” with audiences. She is on the button. 

Disconnect the medium from the reality that inspired it in the first place and our understanding will be dulled. And those who claim opera is irrelevant today will have proven their case.